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Education Dept. Seeks Strategies to Improve College-Completion Efforts

January 27, 2012, 1:55 pm

The U.S. Department of Education has asked colleges and universities to report on their successful strategies toward achieving President Obama’s goal of the United States having the highest percentage of postsecondary-degree holders in the world by 2020. In a notice scheduled to appear in Monday’s Federal Register, the department is reaching out to institutions of higher education, as well as states and nonprofit organizations, for strategies that have worked. The reported best practices, the notice says, will be posted online in due course. In line with that effort, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, plans to hold a symposium on Monday devoted to college completion.

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  • 11345435

    To assist high school seniors and enrolled students at colleges, universities, and community colleges that they have the best information available as to their employability in their chosen profession and/or current course of study, schools should be required to provide continually updated statistics on the current and projected jobs for a student who graduates in a given field (possibly including GPA and school of graduation), based on location and what the projected yearly and lifetime earnings in such field, and what the financial consequences would be if the student did not complete the program.  This type of information would allow the student to have the opportunity to change course if the prospects of few openings or no job opportunities were projected upon his or her graduation.

  • jcbmack

    Agreed 11345435

  • chronanon

    Which is all well and good if your goal is to prepare students for yesterday’s jobs and not tomorrow’s.  There was an interesting statistic reported by Times Higher Education (that admittedly I cannot find the original source for): 65% of jobs that will be available at college graduation do not even exist when a student enters high school.  Our ability to project job opportunities is hampered significantly by our ability to project the jobs themselves.  That’s why we teach students to think, learn, and communicate, not how to work Excel 2010 or operate a spectrometer.

  • tlgriffith18

    The employment statistics can be found through Bureau of Labor & Statistics (Dept of Labor). Why should a school be required to re-create the wheel? And why “continually updated?” I can think of much better use of limited school funds than to spend all that time and money updating statistics. At most a link to the BLS website would be helpful, should students or parents want to check this out: The Occupational Outlook Handbook has just about all the data you say prospective students need.  

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